It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)

Thursday, October 01, 2015

I AM FROM ALBERTA WE KNOW COAL
A hundred years ago my grandfather a Ukrainian immigrant worked in the coal mines in Wayne Alberta.
Forty years ago I went to University in Lethbridge, Alberta, the home of coal mining in southern Alberta.
Alberta exports more coal than oil by rail.
Alberta' now strip mines coal next to power plants, Genesee Plant lake Wabamum owned by EPCOR
For sixty years even after the discovery of oil in Leduc Alberta remains a coal province.
Most of our GHG comes from the emissions from coal fired power plants.
Rachel Notely and the NDP government wll now transfer coal fired power plants to natural gas, another fuel we have plenty of.
Former Premier Lougheed was never an oil man he worked for Mannix Corporation which owns Luscar Coal Mining. They wanted to open up an
open pit mine just outside Jasper National Park.
But that project became fiscally and socially unfeasible..
Alberta was home to the United Mineworkers, the Western Miners Union, IWW and OBU, the first western coal mining strike was in Medicine Hat, later the miners organized in Southern Alberta, building a base along with the Communist Party in the Crowsnest Pass Blairmore area of the Rockies in Southern Alberta.
Edmonton at the turn of last century was a mining city, with coal mines criss crossing underneath the riverbank. Ukrainian mining families dug into the riverbank 1912-15 to live in caves.
So while we are known now for oil, oil sands, we were once like Pennsylvania in the USA a coal mining region. with a large Ukrainian population and with oil which is why we both survived unlike West Virginia .
Today both Alberta and Pennsylvania also have shale oil. we have long histories of fracking.

The myth of clean coal comes from the experimental and not yet proven Carbon Capture and Sequestration CCS.This has nothing to do with being green or reducing the use of one form of fossil fuel, coal. Instead CCS takes coal gas (methane) by making it into a liquid by putting it under pressure and injecting it into existing played out oil fields, including shale oil, to extract residual oil. In other words CCS is just another form of fracking